A10 eZ re THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAy, MARCH 14 , 2020
The coronavirus outbreak
they were angry that the CDC
provided detailed guidance on
when to close schools just on
Thursday afternoon.
Short-term closure of schools
during the early stages of a
spreading disease is unlikely to
stem the problem, according to
the guidance. Instead, it causes
significant disruption for fami-
lies, schools and those who might
be responding to outbreaks in
health-care settings. The CDC
also said it could increase the
impact on older adults who care
for grandchildren and for chil-
dren whose parents and family
members are hourly and low-
wage workers. other options in-
clude staggering recess and can-
celing assemblies.
Longer closures, such as four
weeks, could result in more stu-
dents gathering outside of school
and increase the risk to older
adults or others who are more
vulnerable, including those with
underlying medical conditions.
“It’s not necessary to take ag-
gressive actions in areas where
there isn’t spread of this virus or
there’s not been sustained com-
munity spread,” said one federal
official involved in the response,
who spoke on the condition of
anonymity to speak candidly.
But for many state and local
officials, decisions are often made
that are based on more than just
CDC guidance.
“You have to look at what is
happening to us locally,” said mi-
chael fraser, chief executive of
ASTHo, the association that rep-
resents state health directors.
“Parental pressure to close is ex-
tremely high. folks are so wor-
ried.”
others seem to be taking the
mammoth disruptions more in
stride. Scott Sleigh, a 47-year-old
project manager from Santa
Clara, Calif., said he had been
teleworking for the past week —
and expected to do so for several
more. He also had to cancel a trip
to Disneyland after the theme
park said Thursday it would be
temporarily shutting down.
That’s inconvenient, he said
while shopping at a Walmart in
Santa Clara, but it’s for a greater
good.
“They’re trying to prevent the
spread,” he said.
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]Craig reported from new york. Annie
Gowen in Kansas City, Kan., Arelis r.
Hernández in san Antonio, Griff witte
in san Fr ancisco and william wan
contributed to this report.does when he’s flying.
“There was no guidance and
now everyone is just trying to do
what they think is right, but now
you can’t contain it,” he said,
noting that the closures of Broad-
way and Disney mean restaurants
don’t have people in them and
tourism declines — an impact he
can see. “I think people are less
concerned about the virus and
more concerned about the finan-
cial impact of not having a job.”
New York saw its number of
coronavirus cases in the state
grow by 96 in just one day. The
state now has 421 confirmed cas-
es, including 154 in New York City.
Cuomo said he is expecting thou-
sands of cases to be confirmed in
coming weeks. He worries that
the state’s hospital capacity will
become overwhelmed, and non-
urgent surgeries will be post-
poned.
“It was here before you knew it,
it was wider spread in the past
than you know, and it will spread
more than you think,” Cuomo
said. “Nobody is going to be im-
mune from this.”
many people who are sick and
seeking to be tested for the coro-
navirus have been turned away
because they don’t meet strict
testing criteria. officials an-
nounced friday that there will be
drive-through testing facilities
opening in New rochelle, N.Y.,
which is seeing one of the worst
outbreaks in the nation, and San
Antonio, where cruise ship evacu-
ees were transferred to a nearby
Air force base.
In California, routines were
being scrambled by a cascade of
closures. more than 670,000 stu-
dents will stay home in Los Ange-
les. To compensate, the district
said it would open dozens of
“family resource centers” where
children will be able to get meals
and parents can get a break from
child care.
San Diego, which has the
state’s second-largest school dis-
trict, also is shutting schools. In a
joint statement, the leaders of the
two districts acknowledged that
efforts to stop the virus from
entering their communities had
failed and that a fresh approach is
needed.
“California has now entered a
critical new phase in the fight to
stop the spread of the covid-
pandemic,” wrote L.A. superin-
tendent Austin Beutner and San
Diego superintendent Paul
Gothold. “There is evidence the
virus is already present in the
communities we serve, and our
efforts now must be aimed at
preventing its spread.”
Some state health officials saidpandemic coming from some-
where with some kind of virus, so
we should not be shocked and
surprised that the time has come,”
Collins said.
What happens next depends
on how robustly the public health
systems can respond to the crisis.
Hospitals typically operate at
nearly full capacity, even without
a major contagion. This pandem-
ic will test the ability of thousands
of hospitals and medical facilities
to handle a surge of critical cases.
Some public health leaders are
urging the government to take
aggressive steps to help people
who feel they have to go to work
even if sick.
“There are huge equity issues
here. There are millions of people
in America who are unable to stop
working if they’re sick,” s aid rich-
ard Besser, president and CEo of
the robert Wood Johnson foun-
dation and a former acting direc-
tor of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. “We
don’t want to force people to
choose between paying the rent,
putting food on the table and
protecting their health and the
health of others.”
Dez Phil, a 49-year-old flight
attendant heading into a super-
market in the Bronx, said he now
worries more about catching the
coronavirus on the street then hehave seen workplaces closing and
employees telecommuting. But
many employees, including those
in low-wage service-sector jobs,
must still show up at work to get
paid.
Two of America’s most iconic
places: Broadway and Disney
World, are closed, but nightlife in
places like New orleans has con-
tinued unabated. In florida,
where some 5 million people are
over the age of 60 and potentially
vulnerable to a more serious
covid-19 illness, many seniors this
week continued their normal rou-
tines, including dance parties.
“The best thing we can do now
to try to get through a very tough
period is to try to slow the passage
from one person to the next so
that we don’t overwhelm our
health-care system,” francis Col-
lins, the director of the National
Institutes of Health, said in an
interview friday.
Collins said he is “very wor-
ried” about the virus and warned
that if no action is taken the
United States could end up like
Northern Italy, where covid-19 is
spreading unabated, more than
1,000 people have died and doc-
tors are making unfathomable
choices about who lives and dies.
“We have all been saying for
years, maybe decades, that we
were overdue for this kind ofchoice but to shut schools and
manage as best we can the very
substantial disruption to our
families and communities,” Lic-
cardo said.
The strategic shift toward try-
ing to impede the virus through
social distancing is a calculated, if
highly disruptive, attempt to slow
down its spread by limiting the
potential chains of transmission:
people closely interacting with
other people. The United States
remains in the early stages of its
fight with the virus and is now
trying to keep sick and infected
people from passing it on to those
who are healthy, o r at l east to slow
the transmissions enough to pre-
vent a crush on the public health
system.
Governors of numerous states,
including California, ohio and
New York, have barred large-scale
gatherings, as have officials in
Washington state. officials in
Santa Clara County, Calif., on
friday announced even more re-
strictive rules, banning gather-
ings of more than 100 people and
decreeing that whenever 35 peo-
ple get together, they must have at
least six feet of distance from
others.
The vast r etreat into homes has
occurred in spotty fashion. major
cities, including Washington D.C.,
San francisco and Los Angeles,water and cleaning products for
what some expect could be
lengthy isolation within homes
from coast to coast.
There are now more than 2,
confirmed cases of covid-19, the
disease caused by the virus,
across the country, with reports
in nearly every state. forty-eight
deaths in the United States have
been linked to the virus, 25 of
them in the Life Care Center of
Kirkland nursing home in subur-
ban Seattle, including three an-
nounced friday. Health officials
in Kansas said friday that an
elderly man who died this week of
coronavirus was a resident of the
Life Care Centers of America fa-
cility in Kansas City, Kan.
The national strategy for bat-
tling the coronavirus has shifted
dramatically in the past 48 hours:
It was a public health crisis for
weeks, a societal disruption in
recent days and only became an
official national emergency on
friday afternoon. Strategies to
combat its spread have been ap-
plied in a patchwork way, with
some communities and states far
more aggressive in closing work-
places and pushing for social dis-
tancing, while others have done
next to nothing.
Shutdown America came as a
recognition that the nation’s ear-
lier, disparate strategies could not
block the virus at the border or
bottle it up in the places where it
initially seeded. It signaled a na-
tional resignation that the virus
has taken hold and hijacked nor-
malcy, replacing it with fear and
uncertainty.
“Thinking you are going to
escape coming in contact with
this, it’s not going to happen,”
New York Gov. A ndrew m. Cuomo
(D) said friday. one of his daugh-
ters had been in a precautionary
14-day quarantine due to possible
exposure. “I understand fully the
anxiety of people ... but you can’t
control it. Who knows where the
cabdriver was, who knows where
the person who sits next to you on
the bus was, who knows who your
buddy was with last night?”
“I don’t t hink this is going to be
a short-term issue,” Cuomo said.
“I think this could be a six, seven,
eight, nine-month affair.”
As the closures accelerated fri-
day, S an Jose mayor Sam Liccardo
blamed the national shortage of
test kits, a complaint that has
emerged in several jurisdictions.
“In the absence of adequate
resources in the U.S. for testing
that would enable local commu-
nities to mitigate the spread of
covid-19, we are left with little
VIrus from A
Closures accelerate as states attempt to contain spread, o∞cials sound alarms
Andrew Kelly/reuters
A woman wears a face mask on the subway as the coronavirus outbreak continued in New York City.
New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo warned that the disruption to daily life could continue for months.BY CHRIS MOONEY,
JOHN MUYSKENS,
BRADY DENNIS
AND ANDREW FREEDMANfirst, it happened in China.
Now, Italy.
The coronavirus struck hard,
and authorities responded with
sweeping interventions to keep
people from s preading the disease
further. As citizens hunkered
down at home, businesses and
roads suddenly fell empty and
silent. one startling result: a de-
cline in air pollution and green-
house gas emissions.
The Washington Post t his week
analyzed data from the European
Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satel-
lite, which can measure concen-
trations of greenhouse gases and
other pollutants in the lower at-
mosphere. It shows that between
Jan. 1 and march 12, concentra-
tions of nitrogen dioxide, or No2,
fell drastically, especially over
hard-hit northern Italy.
Nitrogen dioxide is not one of
the major greenhouse gases
linked to climate change. But it is
produced from combustion — by
cars, power plants, and other in-
dustrial sources. So it serves as a
proxy for other emissions that
warm the atmosphere. It also is a
pollutant that can increase the
risk of asthma, inflammation of
the lungs and other harmful
health conditions. S everal experts
told The Post that the changing
concentrations probably reflect
the decline of driving in particu-
lar, in a country in which more
than half of cars burn diesel.
“I guess this is mostly diesel
cars out of the road,” Emanuele
massetti, an expert on the eco-
nomics of climate change at G eor-
gia Te ch University who has stud-
ied Italy’s climate policies, said in
an email.
“I expect pollution to drop even
further as the particles in the
atmosphere (concentration) get
either dispersed or absorbed,” he
continued. “In a few days, they
will enjoy the cleanest air ever in
northern Italy.”
That shift is little comfort, of
course, to a region in the grips of a
deadly outbreak, wrestling with
an overwhelmed health system
and understandably focused on
the crisis at hand rather than the
long-term effects of climate
change. At the same time, the
stark changes offer yet another
example of the impact humans
have on the environment — and
how swiftly emissions can vanish
when humans drastically reduce
the burning of fossil fuels.
Despite the wide use of diesel
engines, Italy’s electricity sector
doesn’t burn a massive amount of
coal, massetti said — rather, it is
driven largely by natural gas and
renewable energy.Greenhouse gas emissions in
the country also have plummeted
in recent years. That’s one reason
massetti said he thinks the emis-
sions decline mainly represents a
steep decrease in the driving of
diesel vehicles. The transporta-
tion sector produces more than 70
percent of all nitrogen dioxide
emissions in milan, according to a
recent analysis by the European
Commission’s Joint research
Center.
“This makes a lot of sense e spe-
cially since it shows that the high-
est decrease in concentration has
happened in Lombardy, where
the most stringent choices were
taken first,” Edoardo marcucci,
who directs the Transport re-
search Lab at roma Tre Universi-ty in rome, said in an email. “I
would expect that to become true
for the whole country in the next
few days.”
riccardo Valentini, a professor
at Italy’s University of Tuscia and
director of the impacts division of
the Euro-mediterranean Center
on Climate Change, said in an
email that the country’s aggres-
sive measures to contain the virus
have had a profound effect on
everyday life — and by extension,
on emissions.
“Nobody can go out from
homes unless for precise working
duties and/or food purchase or
health emergency,” he said. “for
sure, there has been a decline of
car traffic everywhere. This ex-
plains the Nox emission decline.”He added that Italy’s troubles
could potentially soon extend
throughout the region and to oth-
er parts of the globe. “We are the
first E.U. country to get the epi-
demic outbreak, but numbers are
increasing in Spain, france and
Germany, plus the others,” Valen-
tini wrote, adding, “The real im-
pact on climate policies could
vary country by country depend-
ing on the size of the containment
measures.”
In the United States, for exam-
ple, school closures, event cancel-
lations and work-from-home poli-
cies will mean millions of people
are no longer commuting by car
during rush hour, resulting in pol-
lution declines here, too. Beyond
the public health and economiccrises, he said, the pandemic ulti-
mately could trigger the most sig-
nificant reduction of greenhouse
gas emissions of the past century.
While the ongoing crisis has
drastically slowed emissions in
China, Italy and potentially else-
where, that has offered little cause
for celebration.
“It is, of course, not a good
thing,” Valentini wrote. “This is
not the way to reduce emissions!”
Climate advocates agree, say-
ing the current catastrophe is not
the way any reasonable person
would envision the world lower-
ing its carbon footprint. In addi-
tion, the outbreak has halted
meetings to plan for public pro-
tests for climate action in the
coming months, as well as the
global push to get nations to com-
mit to more ambitious emission
reduction plans at a key U.N. sum-
mit scheduled for this fall.
moreover, the drop in emis-
sions is expected to be temporary.
“This will have just a minor effect
of global concentrations of Co2,
unless it leads to a really long
depression of the world economy,”
massetti said.
Italy has been a world leader in
its reductions of greenhouse gas-
es in recent years. Carbon dioxide
emissions in the country declined
by over 30 percent between 2004
and 2018. Last year, Italy an-
nounced that it planned to be-
come the first country to make it
mandatory for schoolchildren to
learn about climate change and
sustainable development.
Italian education minister
Lorenzo fioramonti said at the
time that beginning this Septem-
ber, teachers in all state schools
and all grades would dedicate 33
hours per year — nearly an hour
per week of instruction — to is-
sues related to climate change
and environmental sustainability.
for now, however, all schools in
Italy remain closed.
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[email protected]Pollution is plummeting in locked-down Italy, data shows
Source: Sentinel-5P satellite data via the European Space Agency JOHN MUYSKENS/THE WASHINGTON POSTNitrogen dioxide concentration, two-week average
Less NO 2 More NO 2200 KM200 MILESJan. 1 to Jan. 15 Feb. 26 to March 11
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